Paint-making notes

So I spent some time work­ing with the old “putrido” recipe described in this post.

First I made tita­nium white egg tem­pera by grind­ing egg yolk (with a lit­tle water added) to tita­nium white pig­ment. I used a frosted glass muller, grind­ing on a mar­ble slab. Fol­low­ing the recipe, I made it stiffer than I would if I were going to paint with it in egg tem­pera. Then I used a palette knife to mix it in approx­i­mately equal parts with some tube flake white (Doak’s flake 1c). (I don’t work with lead white in pow­der form.) I mulled the mix­ture on the slab. As the recipe pre­dicted, the paint instantly became very stiff—much stiffer than either of the two ingre­di­ents before mulling. The recipe sug­gests adding oil, emul­sion, or water. I added more egg yolk (emul­sion) until the paint became work­able. I mulled for sev­eral min­utes and trans­ferred it to my palette. It was quite thick.

Then I made some burnt sienna oil paint by mulling in lin­seed oil. I tried mak­ing egg tem­pera by mix­ing egg yolk with pigment/water paste, but it was very thin. I added a bit of dry pig­ment. Then I fol­lowed the same pro­ce­dure, mix­ing the oil paint with the egg tem­pera in equal pro­por­tions. Again, it stiff­ened instantly. This time I added a bit of oil and, when that didn’t do the trick, a lit­tle water. After mulling this mix­ture for a few min­utes, I trans­ferred it to my palette. Again, it was very thick.

Then I tried paint­ing with it. The paint alone was unwork­ably thick and pasty. It mixed eas­ily with water, how­ever. I was able to paint loosely. It han­dled sim­i­larly to other tem­pera grassa recipes I’ve worked with when thinned with water. Eas­ier to blend than egg tem­pera, but not so smooth as oil paint. I could imag­ine using this for a lean underpainting.

Con­clu­sions:

• Over­all, this was not a suc­cess. The paint is not man­age­able with­out a lot of thin­ning down. It is not supe­rior to other recipes that are eas­ier to make. On the other hand, this was my first time. Next time, I will exper­i­ment by adding more oil to the mix­ture. It should still be water-mixable even with con­sid­er­ably more oil than I used.
• This is time-consuming. It would only be worth doing if I could make up a palette of col­ors and get them to last for at least a week or two before becom­ing bad or, well, putrid. The recipe sug­gests a few drops of clove oil. That would pre­serve the egg yolk and act as a retarder for the oil. The prob­lem, poten­tially, is that the clove oil would retard the dry­ing of the oil com­po­nent of the paint after it’s been applied to the paint­ing. That might slow the process of apply­ing mul­ti­ple lay­ers. Another pos­si­bil­ity would be to add a few drops of white wine vinegar.
• In terms of time, this will really only work for me with tem­pera mixed with tube paint. I don’t have time to grind my own fresh oil paint rou­tinely, although that would prob­a­bly pro­duce supe­rior results.
• Thus, I need to learn how to make more work­able paint, and learn to make it last.

Update

24 June 2008: Applied thinly, the paint was com­pletely dry the next day. It def­i­nitely has poten­tial, at least for underpainting.